Government by hire purchase—as M. MendBs-France's man. date for one month from the French Assembly has been described—is in principle objectionable. In practice, it was...

T HROUGHOUT Wednesday's debate on foreign affairs, Mr. Eden was on the verge of being optimistic. At one point he even began to sketch the outline of a possible settlement for...

The situation in French North Africa is steadily deteriorating, largely unnoticed by observers abroad. Last week in Tunisia the M'zali government resigned and its fall marks the...

Crichel Down affair. The Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, has still to face a debate in the House of Commons and to find a way to deal with the indignation which was...

The idea of sending an eminent scholar, Australian by birth, to attempt to settle some of the most difficult practical problems in a large area of tropical Africa, represents a...

It is no good pretending with Mr. Eden that the " invasion " of Guatemala is just another Central American incident. It is neither the first time nor the last that civil wars in...

The interim report on the relationship between smoking and cancer presented to the American Medical Association by Dr. Cuyler Hammond will probably cause many a smoker to gasp...

The Spectator attaches the greatest importance to the maintenance of Anglo - American relations on a sound basis. To this end, it aims to provide the best possible service of...

at the beginning of the week, and cheered him and Sir Winston off on their visit to President Eisenhower at the end. Gloomy and unsettled though the international outlook is,...

That is not the whole story, of course. Whatever Mr. Bevan and his friends may be up to, it still remains true that Mr. Attlee and his friends would like to be able to pursue a...

Although it would seem to abrogate to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries functions and powers vested (I had hitherto supposed) by the Almighty in the mysterious pro-...

G UATEMALA was the first country (Russia was the second) where I saw infantry marching and making no noise at all with their feet. In Russia this was because they were marching...

The wind and the rain were from the north-east next day. As we cut through a grey sea at between seven and eight knots the long, gay, lifeless ranks of bathing huts on the dun...

A reader who put a classified advertisement in the Spectator a couple of weeks ago received in due course a bulky OHMS" envelope measuring some 8in. by 6in. It contained a copy...

You can generally (I maintain) tell when a rabbit is being hunted by a stoat, because it moves in a stiff, tucked up, pre- occupied way. The young rabbit that came running down...

down on the buoy that marked the finish; the boom shot up the port fore-stay and the great russet sail billowed out at an angle as unnatural an arresting as Count Dracula's...

By RICHARD ROVERE . New York At any rate, the hearings themselves are over at last. One gathers that the British reaction to them has been revulsion. It is a sound reaction....

By JEROME CAMINADA Johannesburg W HAT is it that fires the mind of a man in political office after he has reached the age of seventy, or even seventy-five ? Power to shape the...

By OLIVER STEWART T WENTY-FIVE years ago the talk was all of the coming era of private flying, when ' everybody ' would own a light aeroplane and use it as a normal means of...

By GEORGE BRINSMEAD newspapers, in all of which they had acquired key positions. Thus President Arbenz—like his immediate predecessor, the schoolmaster Arevalo, who was the...

— Trio- Ballet. (Rialto.) Icorked, for both Miss Smith and Mr. ogarde in their love-hate relationship, are . companionable as those tigers we hear . o much about. The characters...

ART imprisoned by his own success, is struggling to extend the range of his vision and its expression, and the large number of botanical studies here show the care and...

The Aldeburgh Festival IT is generally presumed that those who attend music festivals are avid for quantity as well as quality; and on the evening of June 17th the planners of...

Where There's a Will. By R. F. Delderfield. (Garrick.) THERE is a well-worn recipe for, generating English humour which might be called `the desert-island solution.' Take some...

Ballet Workshop at the Mercury Theatre, the other by the Rambert Ballet at Sadler's Wells. The first, Conflict, is by Ivor Meggidor, whose choreography 1 have never before seen....

advancing armies of television, or at least a gallant and successful rearguard action, for sound radio to present Henry the Eighth as one of its biggest drama productions of the...

rather misleading account of the affairs of the World Veterans Federation given by Strix in his ` Notebook ' on 21st Maya 1 should be grateful of an opportunity to correct the...

against Sir Compton Mackenzie's inspiring advocacy of Enosis (Union of Cyprus with Greece) has demon- strably failed. The arguinent that the demand for union is confined to a...

of the people of Cyprus to unite with the motherland, I do not see why a plebiscite is not proclaimed forthwith— which is what the Archbishop of the island has been requesting...

ENOSIS SIR,—Sir Compton Mackenzie's appeal for justice to the Greek nation by ceding to it the island of Cyprus, in accordance with the express wishes of its people and in that...

figures which he quoted in his article on the Italian cinema in your issue of May 14th. They are wildly wrong. The number of films produced at Cinecitta in 1953 was thirty-six,...

for my regiment, the 1st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers, at Braman Lane ground against a local eleven which included George Hirst. One of our team, Private Ryan, was a fierce...

S14,—It is unjust of your correspondent G. II, Wilbraham to blame the German horn fot• the unpleasant horn tone of Many of out orchestras today. The fault lies with the con-...

issue of June 4th, Mr. Skelton seems to labour under thC delusion, shared by many inhabitants of England and Northern Ireland that 'Eire' is the name of the twenty- six,...

SIR, — If Mr. W. Kent Power (Spectator o June 11th) loathes McCarthy and McCarthyism,' he should take the trouble of acquiring a copy of the April 1954 issue of The Progressive,...

SIR,—Your editorial comments on the re- current staff troubles at the Tate Gallery are most timely. It was unfortunate that Mr. Butler, when replying to Parliamentary ques-...

to warn artists of the dangers of accepting contracts which contain clauses prohibiting appearances on commercial television. Such contracts, we understand, are now being...

subject, but the close relationship of the parties effected a revulsion of feeling and, as far as is known, this was the last duel fought in England. Duelling, however, was...

IT is only a second's job to put a match to a gorse hush. In less than a minute the flames have run through it and the black skeleton remains, smoking and smouldering and...

The Belgians have recently set up a Ministry for the Middle Classes, one of whose chief tasks, no doubt, will be to protect its charges from other organs of government....

discondbrts of this type of alfresco party which Miss H. Pearl Adam once began. She got as far as: A was the Anthill we failed to remark; B was the Backache that Jbllowed the...

?al Conipton Mackenzie WEEK or two ago I received a letter from a gentleman who described himself as an American journalist. Here is an extract: " I have come across, in the...

The Playing Fields , By ,D. W. BROGAN I T is a long time since I read, I believe in the works of the late Philip Guedalla (of Rugby), that the first Duke of Wellington did not...

A Sense of Humour By KINGSLEY AMIS HE typical vice of the writer on humour is lack of respect for the subject. Even more than funny writing itself, writing on funny writing is,...

Warren Hastings. By Keith Feiling. (Macmillan. 30s.) ONE lesson to be learnt from this important,book is that power does not always corrupt but it certainly confines. The story...

The Way of the Four Winds. By Yrjo Kokko. (Gollancz. 16s.) clouds—not material goods, not men, not even the deer. So if in the end they die out and their bright blue clothes,...

Freedom of the Parish. By Geoffrey Grigson. (Phoenix House. 21s.) ANY village that is relatively unspoiled is to be prized, but the village and parish of Peylint, in Cornwall,...

Manzoni and His Times. By Archibald Colquhoun. (J. M. Dent. 21s.) WHEN Mr. Colquhoun's fine translation of Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi appeared two or three years ago, reviewers...

The Story of Architecture in Mexico. By Trent E. Sandford. (Vision Press. 42s.) Mexico has—small wonder—often had a seemingly intoxicating effect on its delineators, painters...

The Betrayers. By Ruth Chatterton. (Harrap. 12s. 6d.) THE fringe products of McCarthyism are going to make fascinating tnaterial for someone who needs a Ph.D. in, say, 1984. We...

Two prizes are awarded each week - a copy of she De Luxe edition of Chambers's Twentieth Cen- tury Dictionary and a book token for one guinea. These will be awarded to the...

OA A 1) R 6 al 1 NS E E 0,00n. AM 0 S int.W.1[10 GAlEgiA . TMN EIRON t elaP ME ila 021P MA lal fa a I N El O1o3EattavE C MIR LOM 0 NIS 'II n Apis L Aso oM OwEinBEI I...

THERE comes a time with many poets when they feel a need to write something of greater length than a lyric—"something I can turn round," Keats put it. This is not necessarily a...

25s.) DR. EFIRENWALD is an enthusiast. Himself convinced that telepathic communication not uncommonly occurs between individuals —and particularly, in his own experience,...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE temporary pause in the bull market on the Stock Exchange allowed the Financial Times index of ordinary shares to dip 31 per cent. but that was all. It...

By CUSTOS THE mild 'shake-out' on the Stock Exchange did not last nearly as long as many had expected. A sudden spate of good reports, higher dividends and bonuses brought the...